A journey through a land of fantasy…

A few minutes ago, I was reading an interview with Tim Kring, the creator of the TV series Heroes, and I was struck by something he said.  “This is something that I’ve talked about from day one – this is an organic process and you let the show speak to you as much as you speak to it…Otherwise, you’re trying to impose a will on a living creature that doesnt seem to want to play by the rules.  It wants to go where it wants to go.”  He was speaking about how some of the characters from the show evolved beyond what he had originally intended they should be, most notably Jack Coleman’s Noah Bennet (Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man), who originally was meant to be a bit part and became a regular.

This definitely applies to the creation of a story-based role-playing campaign.  Chorenn originally was intended to be the story of a party that finds out that one of its members was not what he seemed, and whether or not they decide to help or hinder him on his destiny.  Along the way, though, partially because of (unconscious) pressure from players’ characters and partially because there needed to be backstory to make things consistent, a huge number of new elements have arisen: The elves waiting in secret for the monarchy to fall so that they can obliterate the human lands, the disillusioned fallen angel who has taken to creating a paradise on earth (in his own image, of course), and the still-unknown blood relation between two of the party members.

Things continue to evolve, too.  Most recently, one of the players left the game in the middle of a situation in which his character could not actually leave (and a new character could not replace her), and this resulted in the introduction of a man from the past, released from being trapped against his will in a powerful artifact.  Part of the story, then, will be devoted to his rediscovering the world and finding out what happened to his family in the intervening 600 years.

Similarly, a player’s departure early on in the game, and the explanation of what happened to him led to a better definition of how the evil king thinks and works.  He became a lot less simply self-interested, greedy, and cruel, evolving into an intelligent, self-interested, greedy, and cruel monarch, which is even worse.

If a game master wants to create a real, vibrant world and an immersive story, he must work with the players to create it together, and embrace the changes, the evolutions, that happen along the way.  Work with story.  Don’t force it to do something simply because it was what you had intended when you first started.